Mouse Tracking for UX Testing

Website usability is becoming a more and more important part of customer satisfaction. Regardless of whether or not your business is primarily online, your customers (and potential customers) likely interact with your website often, and that makes it important for you to develop a website that not only suits their needs, but also sells them on your products and services. Measuring this can be difficult, however.

While self-reporting (surveys) are a crucial, it may not tell the entire story on its own. That's why software developers have created programs that provide "mouse tracking."

When someone visits your website they use their mouse to navigate through the website. The mouse doesn't always move directly to the place they need to go. Sometimes it lingers.

Other times it moves slowly. There is a great deal of data involved in how the cursor moves on the website. Mouse tracking finds that data, and uses it in a way that is more than simply website analytics.

You can learn, for example, if a mouse goes to one place before stopping and moving to another, or if the user appears to not be sure where to click next. Mouse tracking can also be installed in a website's code, so that you can continually learn about where the mouse has headed. Often people also use mice as they would their eyes, so mouse tracking has many similarities to eye tracking.

Low Cost Mouse tracking is simply a type of software/code that you install on your website. Once you've made the purchase, the software goes to work, and you can continually receive a great deal of data from your visitors without the hefty cost of other research materials. You will need someone with the skill to analyze the data, but that is arguably true of any type of market research method.

Huge Sample Research isn't confined to traditional samples. Indeed, this type of market research is a code on your website, so every one of your visitors represents part of your sample, and the sample itself becomes essentially unlimited. You can even cross reference against new visitors and returning visitors, if that's part of your software, and potentially learn about what sticks in memory, among other things.

We'll go over additional benefits of mouse tracking in the next article, followed up by some of the weaknesses of this system.